Mi. Bar owners fight back!
- Thread starter OntarioVanMan
- Start date
another thing that hurt bars is they can be sued for serving an impaired customer as can a host of say a football party and letting someone drive...and the penalties for a DUI have increased greatly in some states...
Not really. It starts off that way, but it's really more about exerting power and control over people's liberties in small steps they are willing to give up. If it was about protecting people, then cigarettes would simply be banned, which is what the anti-smoking crowd really wants. But people won't put up with that, not all at once, and the states don't want to give up the revenue.
If it were about protecting people, seat belts wouldn't be mandatory, helmets would be. Seatbelt or not, the most common and more severe injuries are still head injuries, which helmets would all but eliminate. But people won't put up with that. Seat belts mess up your clothes, which is why it took so long to get people to accept mandatory seat belt use. Helmets can destroy a salon visit for a Saturday night date, and there's no way that, at least right now, that people are willing to be told they must wear a helmet as a driver or a passenger in a car.
In many, if not most states, helmets are the law for children riding bikes, skateboards, roller blades and many other sporting activities. At least two states are considering mandating helmets for all organized sporting activities, including things like tennis, soccer, and track and field, in order to get kids used to wearing helmets. You can see where that's eventually headed, no pun intended (well, maybe a little bit).
Half the laws that get enacted any more are mostly feel-good efforts of some zealot special interest group (paternalists), and of legislators who need to justify their jobs (not the least of this ilk is the FMCSA). Lawn Darts are illegal, because someone might get hurt with them. It's illegal in most states to use a cell phone or other electronic device while pumping gas, because static electricity or some other errant spark might cause an explosion (despite the fact that not a single instance of this occurring has been documented, anywhere, ever).
This is Paternalism, which is to act for the good of another person without that person's consent, as parents do for children. Its end is benevolent, but its means coercive. Paternalists advance people's interests such as life, health, or safety at the expense of their liberty. In this, paternalists suppose that they can make wiser decisions than the people for whom they act.
Paternalism is a temptation in every arena of life where people hold power over others, in childrearing, education, therapy, and medicine. But, it is in criminal law where it is most divisive. Whenever the state acts to protect people from themselves, it seeks their good. But by doing so through criminal law, it does so coercively, often against their will.
Paternalism protects people from themselves, as if their safety were more important than their liberty. By contrast, limiting liberty can only be justified to prevent harm to other people, not to prevent self-harm. More pointedly, coercion can only be justified to prevent harm to unconsenting others, not to prevent harm to which the actors competently consent.
There are a whole host of these types of laws, like riding a motorcycle without a helmet, gambling, anything to do with sex (homosexual sex, prostitution, polygamy, making and selling pornography, and my new favorite - sexting, where underage girls who send nude photos of themselves to others are now being charged with possession and distribution of child pornography), marijuana, practicing certain professions without a license (education, massage, hair-styling), suicide, assisting suicide, swimming at a beach without a lifeguard, refusing to participate in a mandatory insurance or pension plan, paying a worker less than the minimum wage, selling a prescription drug without a prescription, aggressive pan-handling, nudity at public beaches, truancy, flag burning, duelling, ticket scalping, blasphemy, and dwarf-tossing.
These laws are all there because someone wants to protect you from yourself, or simply because they don't like the fact that you're doing it and you should think and act like they think you should.
Personal liberty is absolute. If that liberty is used to make poor decisions, then so be it. There are many people who can't handle certain freedoms, or don't like it that others choose to use their liberties in certain ways. The government uses this minority of special interest paternalistic zealots to make laws that restrict everyone.
"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual." ~ Thomas Jefferson
chefdennis
Veteran Expediter
Turtle wrote:
Yeap, we had to switch to "frozen turkeys" to bowl in the grocery store aisles in the "after hours dwarf tossing bowling league"....
Hey the league had a strict rule to use boxes of cereal as pins so the dwarfs didn't get hurt...well at least the boxes didn't leave marks!!!
Yeap, we had to switch to "frozen turkeys" to bowl in the grocery store aisles in the "after hours dwarf tossing bowling league"....
Hey the league had a strict rule to use boxes of cereal as pins so the dwarfs didn't get hurt...well at least the boxes didn't leave marks!!!